And the winner for most bizarre tournament is...
It's a landslide. The Atlantic 10 tournament is so surreal that it makes Lost look like an episode of The Waltons.
First off, the conference had their worst season in ages. Usually good for 2, 3 or more bids to the NCAA tourney, the A-10 has only 6th-ranked George Washington to boast on this year. G-Dub ran the table in the Atlantic 10 regular season and stood ready for the coronation this weekend.
Maybe they should have seen the omens when 9 and 10 seeds Temple and Xavier sprung upsets in their first round games. But that was just a prelude to Thursday, when everything that could go wrong did. 9-seed Temple pounded George Washington by 15. 5th-seed St. Joseph's crushed 4-seed St. Louis by 19. Then 10th-seeded Xavier decided to beat 2-seed Charlotte. That left 6-seed Fordham with little choice but to send 3-seed LaSalle packing in the nightcap.
In case you don't have a pen, that leaves the 5, 6, 9 & 10 seeds in the A-10 semifinals. The big winner is the A-10, which will split 2 tournament shares instead of 1, since GWU is going anyway. The big losers are all those bubble teams that are sweating bullets. We don't know the 5th place team in the Mo Valley or Pac-10 or Big 12 is going to the Big Dance, but we know the A-10's 5th place team (at best) has a bright shiny ticket just waiting to be punched.
3/10/2006
Maybe We Could Just Pull a Name Out of a Hat...
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1 Comment:
Its tournaments like this one that you can make the arguement that its not exactly fair for the NCAA to give bids to teams that win their conference tourney. (but since when is anything fair). Teams that have struggled to play good basketball all year and SHOULD be in the tournament are robbed by teams that have a few good days and win their conference tournament. MSU this year is a perfect example. But you could argue the flip side that if you don't give a bid to the winner of the conference tournaments, they would be far less exciting because teams would have little to play for.
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